Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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In Henry Louis Gates’s words, the slave narratives are “a unique creation on the long history of human bondage” because they represent the Africans’ testament of “their own stories about life in slavery and about the meaning of freedom” (xi). However, and acknowledging that the slave narratives support “the very foundation” of “the African American literary tradition, especially its canonical texts” (Gates xii), it should be highlighted that they also inform “the origins of other New World African literatures, even that of Canada” (“This is No Hearsay” 11), as George Elliott Clarke has claimed for so long. In fact, despite the Canadian publications of narratives of African American fugitives, many Canadian literary critics blithely prefer to classify the slave narrative as American and therefore alien to Canada. Interestingly, irrespective of the fact that slave narratives seem to remain absent from most anthologies of and guides to Canadian literature, Clarke’s aim of claiming the preeminence of Canadian slave narratives concurs with a recent theoretical trend that reads slavery as a transnational act and avows the fluidity of the North American frontiers acknowledging the cross-borderness of fugitive slaves’ texts. This move builds upon Clarke’s defense of “some estimated "6000 published narratives” by ex-slaves in Canada, most of them African American and many of them brief transcriptions from interviews, that despite having been published in “hundreds British journals”, are still marginalized in mainstream Canadian literary scholarship (“This is No Hearsay” 13). The Black Canadian scholar and poet laureate sentences that “no matter the snowy camouflages and inky smokescreens that our critics and historians throw over Canada’s own heritage of slavery” because “History abhors lacunae, and so Literature rises to answer back, to shout out what had formerly only been whispered and sighed” (“This is No Hearsay” 14). There is no doubt that the sentence is being accomplished.